3 - Building Afro-Asia: Urbanism, Decolonization, and the 1967 Singapore Afro-Asian Housing Meeting

In October 1967 architects, urbanists, and political leaders from across Africa and Asia gathered in Singapore for the second meeting of the Afro-Asian Housing Organization (AAHO). Founded in Cairo two years earlier, the group was established to facilitate cooperation on questions regarding “housing and urban planning” in the post-colonial world. Held two years after Singapore’s separation from Malaysia, the meeting remains an under-examined but critical event in the history of two of Singapore’s national meta-narratives: its transformation into a green city and its emergence as a global city. 

This present examination explores the salience of this event in the building of these national narratives. It looks at how, on one hand, the summit was an early venue to show the world the growth of Singapore’s high density housing projects, a key component of its transformation into a “garden city.” It also shows, on the other, how five years before Sinnathamby Rajaratnam would famously declare Singapore a “global city,” the city-state established an early platform for a global profile by hosting experts from the recently decolonized world. In so doing it suggests that contemporary Singapore’s “green” and “global” identity are mutually constitutive categories and ones rooted not only in Singapore’s integration into flows of global capital, but also in early exchanges and debates regarding the science and technical expertise of urban planning and building construction in the Afro-Asian post-colonial world

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